The Dutch jewelry designer on the first ring she ever bought, being inspired by Louise Bourgeois and her love of the English countryside

MIXING GOLD, diamonds and semiprecious stones with ostrich eggs, scarab wings and 40,000-year-old woolly mammoth tusk, Bibi van der Velden's creations embody a guileless enrapturement with nature that the Amsterdam-based jewelry designer sees as a natural outgrowth of the English countryside where she grew up.

And the space she now occupies between fanciful and sophisticated seems like an instinctual habitat for the daughter of a sculptor (Michele Deiters) who studied at the Florence Academy of Arts and Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam.

"When I was in Italy, I was collecting objects at craft markets: pocket watches, old rusty keys, small antique pictures—literally anything. I started making jewelry because I thought, 'I have to do something with these objects,' " says Ms. van der Velden, whose line is stocked in London's Dover Street Market, Bergdorf Goodman in New York and Net-a-Porter. "I'm a storyteller and I love things which echo. My challenge as an artist is to either emphasize that story or to put it in a different context."

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Bibi and her mother in France
Rahi Rezvani

My most treasured object is an old book of my grandmother's, called "From Socrates to Schopenhauer." When I was really young, I would have lunch with her one day a week. We would have really intelligent talks and she would get books out of the bookshelf and look things up.

What I like about sculpting is thinking it out very precisely from the beginning, yet it's very organic. Stone has veins going through it, which means sometimes a piece knocks off when you're hammering it, which you didn't want to happen. The trick is to find something new in the form that was just created.

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Louise Bourgeois
Steven Spazuk/REX

The artist I most admire is Louise Bourgeois. I love how she used so many different materials—stone, metal—and ended up, at 98, making things with fabric again.

My biggest challenge is the fact that maybe 10% of what I do is creative and the rest is financial stuff.

When buying jewelry you should go completely the other way from what's in fashion, especially if it's gold or diamond.

The bigger the stone and the shinier it is, the more I would down-dress it. I love pairing bashed-up boyfriend jeans and a T-shirt with diamonds. And never do sets. The ring with the matching earrings and the big necklace ... that's the naffest thing you can do.

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When I travel, I take a vitamin supplement that makes you immune to germs in the plane's airways. I have really nice cashmere trousers and socks. When I arrive somewhere, I always take pictures and make notes and sketches. For some reason, as soon as I'm sitting and drawing, I feel very much connected to the place.

As a child I wanted to be an artist. I've always been in my mother's studio polishing her sculptures, and I think that process of tracing with your fingers over all these organic forms and really getting a feel for the materials and all the different tools, that really shaped me.

‘'The bigger the stone and the shinier it is, the more I would down-dress it’

My favorite book is "Hallucinating Foucault." It's all about people who really choose their own path in life. A lot of the books I read when I was in high school in the Netherlands were about those sorts of role models: anti-heroes. When I was 17 or 18, I read a lot more intellectual books than I do now. All the Russians, stuff like that. I could really absorb those worlds. Now, I'm a bit too distracted.

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A necklace from her collection

My first serious purchase was a mother of pearl ring that was silver with a gold braid around it. I bought that when I was 13 or 14. It was a big thing for me to buy it. It's not a conventional piece of jewelry, and not one of those things [that makes] you think 'I was so childish.' I still have it.

When traveling with jewelry obviously carry it in your hand luggage and I use plastic Ziploc bags so pieces don't get scratched. Safety-wise I think you shouldn't be careless but be casual with it. Don't make a big deal out of it.

A place that always blows my mind is England. The sky can be very gray and dismal but there's something in the air. When I'm here, I really feel at home. They say you have one landscape which really connects to your brain. For my mother that's the mountains and snow and pine trees of Switzerland. For me, it's the English countryside.

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